For gaining traffic to your website without cost, you will be looking at some time being spent.

Back links are very important and can arguably be the best way to increase your website exposure. Effective back links are one way links (meaning not a link exchange) from other websites to yours. For example, had you put a link to your website in your question, you would have created a back link as yahoo instantly indexes the Q&A section of their website. Even Google picks it up. You can build back links in placing your url in ads such as craigslist, creating or commenting on blogs on wordpress and myspace as well as other blogging websites. These are all methods that give you white hat back links.

There is also a new website that has grown in Alexa (an independent website ranking company) by over 18,000,000 in just three weeks called http://www.SayItAloud.com that allows you to write articles that, if they are sponsored, will actually pay you for your article. They have a sales staff that promotes your writings to related companies who would be interested in advertising on your site and pay you up to $135 per article. The site is not officially launched but several people have made money and they have over 200 people writing right now. You can promote your forum in both your profile and articles. You can use the money you get from there to utilize some paid methods.

Caution: do not pay for your back links through back linking companies. This is considered black hat SEO and will actually drop your ranking or get you suspended all together from the big boys of search engines.

As far as paid methods, look at pay per click as a great option. PPC is the process of advertising your business on a search engine within the sponsored results. You choose what keyword phrases you are willing to pay for being in, I.e. Website design.For cost effectiveness, consider narrowing your results as much as possible. For example, Sacramento website design instead of website design would be a more focused result and would by proxy cost much less than the broad term.

SIA Professional Services has an articles section in their website which has a ton of website marketing tips that should help you at http://www.siaservices.net just go to their blog or their articles section.

Be sure you are submitting your website on a regular basis, especially whenever you are doing some good updates on your site. The search engines will see your site being updated on a regular basis and index you accordingly. There are some free submission sites, but I have seen in my experience that those don’t nearly perform as well on a regular basis as professional SEO and marketing companies.

There is plenty more that you can do, but hopefully this give you a good starting point.

If you’re looking to make a quick buck and don’t care if you get banned from most search engines as well as banned from Adsense and Yahoo publisher network, then Black hat is for you. If you’re interested in spending hour after hour posting quality content then White hat is best suited for you. The best way to find a balance between search engines and readership is to stay near white, without being too focused on readers. The last thing you want it 10 returning visitors and no new traffic from search engines.

Nevertheless, should your website or opening webpage
fail to contain "generic" keywords, then anyone using
such "generic" queries will not be able to discover
your website. Your domain name [URL] of your website,
in a sense, will be invisible, undiscoverable.

You may want to consider some simple algorithms which,
when observed and committed in designing of a website
with placement of various critical metatags that can
surely achieve a high search engine presence and
increase Internet traffic to your website. These
metatag strategies work well with published webpages
at Google and Yahoo.

Design: Should you create an extensive Flash-based
website, make sure to fill-in the property entries
such as the Title, Description and Keywords. Failing
to do so, leaves no hard HTML or ALT resource that can
be readily indexed by search robots. Also consider the
Internet audience and their incoming setup. For
example, if they are on analog/dialup, Flash webpages
take too long to load up and therefore analog users
will likely lose interest and discontinue entering the
Flash site. On the other hand, anyone on hi-speed DSL
lines, will welcome Flash pages which load quickly. So
before designing a pure Flash websitge, ask the simple
question, “Who’s my end user – is he on dialup or
DSL?” And if you had to choose between these two users
for maximum marketability, then select analog users
since 80% of most resident users are still analog
Internet subscribers and pure HTML designed webpages
is best for them.

A non-Flash-based website which relies on hard text,
is far easier to be indexed by search robots. Limit
the use of stylized text saved as .gifs since as a
graphic, they are not indexable by search robots.

Avoid use of frames since any number of search robots
are unable to properly classify textual material.

Placement of Metatags:

A ranking or search order does take place with Google
and Yahoo and it begins with the “Title” metag which
should consist of no more than 65 characters separated
by commas. The “Title” should describe in generic
terms, the goods and services, followed by a location
from which the resource is located, i.e., city, state.
The placement of a domain name which is not generic
within the “Title” is not appropriate, unless your
domain name is a major recognizable brand name.

The second metatag is the “Description” which is
usually 25-30 words to form a complete sentence which
best describes one’s goods and services.

And the very last category – “Keywords” are also
somewhat limited to 15-16 words which can be plural
and compound in nature. Again, avoid multiple entries
which could be mistaken as “spamdexed entries” which
is defined as the loading, and submission of
repetitive words into a particular metatag category.
“Spamdexing” when discovered on a webpage and reported
to Google’s spamreport.com can result in the
elimination of your website from their search
directory.

Good luck!

Use classifieds and link exchanges
Good free classifieds like to advertise your services, business, items etc;
1. Sell It Right http://www.sellit-right.com
2. Craigslist http://www.craigslist.com

Use other sources as well as the above
Text Link Exchange http://www.txtswap.com/
Yahoo Classifieds http://classifieds.yahoo.com/

Use a free blog like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com

1. Post blogs about your website.
2. Submit articles
3. Social Bookmarking
4. Submit your website manually to search engines
5. Use keywords liberally on your site, so long as they are used in the correct context of your site topic and content.

Through this you will no longer have to pay for traffic. More of information in the website below. I hope this helps.

you should focus on “stealing eyeballs”. let me give you an example:
http://www.childrendentists.com/ has traffic of parent that are looking for “children dentists”. anyone who puts a banner / ad here is exposed to that traffic. if you are a family / children dentist, you should put an ad here. all the clicks from here will get you quality traffic.

try to find web sites that have your traffic and have banners / ads